Welcome to the starting point for access to data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). This page provides a brief summary of the facilities and data products to guide Pan-STARRS archive users. More complete information is provided on linked pages (see below).

Pan-STARRS is a system for wide-field astronomical imaging developed and operated by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) is the first part of Pan-STARRS to be completed and is the basis for Data Release 1 (DR1). The PS1 survey used a 1.8 meter telescope and its 1.4 Gigapixel camera (GPC1; see
PS1 GPC1 camera) to image the sky in five broadband
filters (g, r, i, z, y). The PS1 Science Consortium funded the operation of the Pan-STARRS1 telescope, situated at Haleakala Observatories near the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii, for the purposes of astronomical research. The PS1 consortium is made up of astronomers and engineers from 14 institutions from six countries.

Users of the current PS1 DR1 data should be aware of a few issues and inconsistencies in the data.
(1) The stack positions (raStack, decStack) have considerably larger systematic astrometric errors than the mean epoch positions (raMean, decMean).
(2) The astrometric and photometric keywords in the image headers are slightly inconsistent with the astrometry and photometry for catalog objects. The catalog quantities are more accurate due to post-image-processing improvements.
(3) FITS image headers use the obsolete PC001001, PC001002, etc., keywords for the WCS. The fluxes have been non-linearly scaled using an asinh transformation. The files also use the tile-compressed image format.

What data is available in DR1 and what data will be available in DR2?

PS1 data products are served from an archive operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), in Baltimore, Maryland.

The PS1 archive includes
images and
catalogs from several defined
surveys, including observations of three quarters of the sky ("3PI Survey," which is available in DR1) carried out several times per filter and over a four-year time span. In addition, there were nightly observations of ten smaller fields distributed across the sky (the "Medium Deep Survey," not part of DR1).

Stack images are co-added images made from the multiple exposures taken over the survey. Stacks provide the best signal-to-noise, and the source catalogs created from the stacks are recommended as a starting point for data analysis.

Mean values of the point-source and extended-object photometry from the
warp images are also available in DR1.

The following
image and
catalog products will be made available in DR2:

Warp images are the result of resampling and realigning the camera images into a skycell of the
PS1 Sky Tessellation, a set of common pixel-grid images with simple projections from the sky. Warps are astrometrically and photometrically calibrated.

Extracted photometry for point sources and extended objects from the
warp images will be made available in DR2. The DR2 source database will allow users to extract information on any time variation of source photometry.

All data from DR1 will be available in DR2 as well.

PS1 data release dates

PS1 DR1 occurred on December 19, 2016.

PS1 DR2 is scheduled for early 2018

PS1 thumbnail sketch

Want a short, succinct summary of PS1, how it was executed and what kinds of data have been produced? Check out the slide deck below. It is now a few months old, and so details should come from these pages, but it presents a good summary of the project.

How to use the PS1 documentation

You are on the home page of the web pages at STScI created to document and explain PS1 and its data products. This first release of PS1 documentation is intentionally minimal in order to focus on the main issues a potential user of the PS1 dataset will face. Details will be added as time permits and as questions arise from users.

These user information pages for PS1 are intended to be individually focused and broken down into a well-linked tree. They approximate the structure of Wikipedia.

In particular, this structure makes it possible for users to search specifically within the domain of this documentation, reducing false positives significantly. We welcome suggestions and comments that can improve our presentation.
Contact archive@stsci.edu with suggestions.

PS1 user information topics

There are five primary informational topics, with links below, that provide further details:

How to get help

Credit where it is due

Here is the text for acknowledging PS1 in your publications:

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

In addition, please cite the following papers describing the instrument, survey, and data analysis as appropriate: